Friday, May 20, 2016

Russian Government Losing Chief Characteristic of a State: Monopoly of Force on Its Territory

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 20 – Max Weber defined
the modern state as a set of institutions that has a monopoly on the legitimate
use of physical force on a given territory, Kirill Martynov says. Only its
official representatives have the right to use force to ensure that people obey
its laws, and the state is responsible for protecting individuals against any
unjust use of force.

But when a state as the Russian
government has done in recent times cedes that power to private groups be they
sportsmen, Cossacks or self-organized militias as the Russian government has
done, the political editor of “Novaya gazeta” points out, such actions “testify
to the deepest crisis of state institutions” (novayagazeta.ru/columns/73140.html).

Such groups who invariably claim to
be the backers of the state against its “enemies” in fact, Martynov says, “weaken”
the state because “their appearance means that the state cannot manage to control
the situation and cannot serve as a universal arbiter for the peaceful
resolution of conflicts.”

That is because the use of such
groups by the state means that “we are moving toward a system of vassal
dependencies: you can hope for physical security only if you are loyal to an
influential lord. Otherwise, you can be declared an enemy, and the force used
against you will be considered completely acceptable.”

In that event, the “Novaya gazeta”
commentator continues, “the state cannot represent the interests of all
citizens.” Moreover, he says, “when non-governmental force becomes the norm of
social life, the agony of the state begins” and society returns, as Thomas
Hobbes pointed out, to “a state of nature, a war of all against all.”

In recent weeks, groups of people
armed or at least prepared to use force and apparently “condoned” by the powers
that be have ever more frequently made their presence known in the attacks on
Aleksey Navalny, in others against those protesting church construction, and
most lethally in the clashes at the Khovansk cemetery.

“It is not accidental,” Martynov
says, “that all these events are occurring” at one and the same time.That is because while “the state is
conducting ever more pompous military parades and issuing ever more loud
patriotic slogans, it is losing real control over the situation in the country.”

Over the last two years, he points
out, ever more people “have said that the main goal of the Russian authorities
and society is not to allow a repetition of the Maidan in Moscow.”But Martynov continues, allowing or even
encouraging such actions of force by independent groups in support of the
regime was exactly why the Ukrainian revolution happened.

When Viktor Yanukovich shared the
use of force with “young sportsmen brought in by bus from the Donbas,” the game
was up and the revolution took off, Martynov says.The Russian authorities should remember that.

Of course, although the “Novaya
gazeta” writer does not mention it, the Russian authorities can look to their
own national history for instruction on this point: the rise of groups like the
Black Hundreds at the end of the Imperial period, groups that claimed to be
supportive of the tsar above all, in fact ushered in the Russian revolutions of
1917.